When we want to check freshness of cryptographically secured messages, we have to use monotonic counters, timestamps or random nonces. Each of these mechanisms increases the complexity of a given system in a different way. Freshness based on counters seems to be the easiest to implement in the context of ad-hoc mesh wireless networks. One does not need to increase power consumption for an extra message for challenge (containing a new random number), nor there is need for precise time synchronisation. It sounds easy but people in the real world are … creative. We have been working with TinyOS, an operating system that was designed for constrained hardware. TinyOS is a quite modular platform and even mesh networking is not part of the system’s core but is just one of the modules that can be easily replaced or not used at all.
Fig.: Structures of TinyOS and TinySec frames with all the counters. TinySec increases length of “data” field to store initialisation vector. (more…)